My tale is somewhat different to many other nurses, as I didn’t catch covid at work. However, it was indirectly NHS related. In November 2020 my Mum had a knee replacement at her local hospital. Mum had re-enablement carers to start with, but when reassessed she wasn’t doing as well as they expected, vomiting frequently and getting weaker rather than stronger. I didn’t see her for the first 3 weeks, as I was working in a GP surgery as an ANP, doing a mixture of phone calls and face to face appointments with our patients. I was concerned about potentially catching covid then passing it to Mum before I was aware of symptoms. At that time we weren’t as aware of the level of asymptomatic infections.
When I visited Mum I was immediately concerned about her, she had lost weight, looked gaunt and with a bloated abdomen. I arranged for a home visit from her surgery again (she’d had one 2 days before and told she’d have some blood tests). Unfortunately the paramedic practitioner who saw Mum twice in 3 days did not recognise how very unwell she was, and took no notice of my older sister’s concerns as she was there when he visited mum. I visited two days later, the day after his visit. Mum’s carer had not attended in the morning to help her up, and she couldn’t get out of bed, I got Mum up. She had vomited ‘coffee grounds’ and I said that once I’d washed her and put a clean nightie on, I was going to call an ambulance for her. Paramedics arrived and gave Mum fluids and took her to hospital with my hastily written history and concerns. That was the last I saw of my Mum.
The A&E Consultant called me, and was wonderfully empathetic, appreciative of the info I had sent in with Mum, and discussed things with my Mum and then myself with great respect and professional courtesy (Mum retired as a nurse 25 years before).
A CT scan was done, and found that Mum had metastatic cancer, with ascites, unknown primary. He recommended that she was admitted for pain control and further tests to perhaps find the primary, and see if there were any treatment options.
Sadly this all happened in the second wave of covid in 2020 so we were not able to go to A&E, or the ward. Staff were ‘going down like flies’, and the ward, unbeknown to us, was no longer a covid-free ward, they had staff looking after covid and non-covid patients in different bays but no way of preventing covid spreading. Mum was in the ward from Dec 20th so even after further scan and an ascitic tap, they weren’t able to organise care support for her to come home. Between Christmas and New Year, mum began coughing. A covid test was not done for 5 days, until I had spoken with a rather arrogant junior doctor who told me Mum was being treated for a chest infection and “not all coughs are covid you know!” I’m sure he regretted having answered the phone! The test was then done and at 2am Mum was moved to the covid bay. Sadly, Mum probably infected other patients in her bay.
My daily phone calls to Mum became too difficult for her, because of the frequency of her cough, and we were advised of ‘palliative care’ on 10th January. Mum died at 2am on 11th January, of her hospital acquired covid-19 and metastatic cancer.
(…part two will follow over the weekend)
